


The Color Red

by Kendrene



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Evil Lena Luthor, F/F, Red Kryptonite Kara Danvers, Rough Sex, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-02
Updated: 2018-04-03
Packaged: 2019-03-12 15:52:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 14,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13550607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kendrene/pseuds/Kendrene
Summary: Lena realizes something is wrong as soon as she steps inside the penthouse.It’s not the shattered glass that glitters like fresh snow in the moonlight, nor the wind whistling through the smashed french doors in the living room. Her eyes take all of that in - and of course it isn’t normal - but they halt on a patch of shadow darker than the rest.ORThe one in which Lena returns home to her wife after a long day at work, and finds a stranger instead.





	1. Vertigo

**Author's Note:**

> I am back with my second SuperCorp venture! This takes place in the same verse as Under the Cape - so Kara and Lena are married, but only Alex and Maggie know. I hope you'll enjoy the story - please let me know in the comments below! This is the first part, and the second will be available soon.
> 
> \- Dren

Lena realizes something is wrong as soon as she steps inside the penthouse. 

It’s not the shattered glass that glitters like fresh snow in the moonlight, nor the wind whistling through the smashed french doors in the living room. Her eyes take all of that in - and of course it isn’t normal - but they halt on a patch of shadow darker than the rest. 

A shadow that moves the moment Lena stares at it, resolving into the silhouette of her wife. Except that the similarities stop at pale hair and ivory skin, her eyes far more cruel than Kara’s are capable of being. This doppelganger's mouth is a twisted sneer, a malevolent baring of teeth that leaves no room for compassion or remorse. 

The worst part however are her eyes, and Lena can’t hold her gaze for long, the glowing embers that burn among the blue so bright that they are blinding. 

This must be what looking directly at a swollen, dying sun feels like. 

The same red shards are embedded under her skin, slithering lines that radiate an eerie light in the darkened apartment. the ruddy-tinted luminescence does nothing to push back the night, only serving to highlight details that Lena would prefer not to see. 

“You’re back.” This hell-spawned version of the woman Lena loves states evenly. 

Her voice lacks any warmth, and if she had to describe it Lena would say it’s painted in indifference. Kara may as well be talking about flecks of mud sticking to her boots.

“You’ve changed.” Lena kicks her heels off and sends them clattering into a corner. She’s read about red-kryptonite, but never seen it first hand and doesn’t know what to expect. 

Kara laughs in her face.

“Changed? How do you know this isn’t the real me? The one I’m meant to be?” She slides her hands along her sides and grins Lena’s way.

It’s the self-satisfied smile of a psychopath. 

Lena says nothing and when Kara steps forward she moves back. She puts the couch between the two of them, but her wife simply follows. They end up circling each other like dogs who’ve never met before and are debating whether or not to go for the jugular.

“There’s a hostage situation underway downtown.” Lena says after a while, hoping that appealing to the kind heart hidden beneath the kryptonite will be enough. She’s heard about it on the radio, while driving home from her late-night meeting. Several people held up in a mall - children too - and it sounds like the kind of thing that could spiral out of control despite the police’s efforts. 

“They could use your help.” 

“I am aware.” Kara rests her forearms on the back of the couch, and if possible her smile widens. “Not that I care.” 

Her words chill the blood in Lena’s veins.

“Why don’t you?” 

“Why should I?” 

Kara stalks forward again and Lena can do nothing but let herself be pushed away from the couch’s relative safety - staggering back until her shoulders hit the wall. 

Her wife doesn’t grab her. She doesn’t use her arms to bracket her, but she may as well be holding Lena by her throat. 

Kara’s flinty stare pins her more effectively than anything physical would and she’s left - helpless and staring - with the slack mouthed horror of someone who’s watching a tragedy unfold.

It’s like witnessing an avalanche as it swallows the entire side of a mountain, knowing that the snow will soon fill the lungs and suffocate while being unable to run for safety. 

“Can you even comprehend how tiring it is to hear them constantly plead and call for help? The whole city wants to be saved, only to forget that kindness a day later and turn on each other like wolves!” 

Kara lunges until they are nose to nose, eyes smoldering. 

“They pretend to be sheep, but the truth is they only wear the clothing! Rabid dogs each and every one of them, and I am tired of this charade.” Her hands - which are the hands of a godlet who could break the world apart if she put her mind to it - go to her chest and the symbol emblazoned on her suit. 

With a tearing sound Kara rips the S off of her chest and pulls it apart between white knuckled fists. What’s left of it is showered on the floor like a handful of confetti for a party that Lena never knew she had to attend. 

A horrific gala to which - unbeknownst to her - she’d been invited.

Lena swallows.

“So you think they don’t deserve you?” 

“They never have and never will.” Kara turns, treading on the shredded cloth and walking back to the smashed window. She steps out into the balcony, the moon muting the red of her billowing cape to a somber grey.

Lena finds it fitting, considering the circumstances. 

The strands of kryptonite pulse just beneath that God-like skin, crisscrossing its perfection. Kara stills, back to Lena and eyes lost somewhere amid the city’s skyline, appearing for all the world like one of the statues Lena saw as a child, when her mother took her to Athens and together they climbed the head-spinning heights of the Acropolis. 

Except that she acts more like one of the Erinyes than Athena. 

Slowly, carefully picking her way around the shambles strewn across the polished floor, Lena approaches her, shivering when the cold of the balcony’s stone seeps upwards from the sole of her bare feet.

Kara inclines her head. She listens to voices only she can hear, and Lena wonders whether the crimson lines wrapped around her flesh are a manifestation of madness rather than something planted there by a third hand. 

“One of them is dead. One of the hostages I mean.” 

She says so matter-of-factly, throwing Lena an amused grin when she hears her gasp. 

In that moment Lena’s heart breaks. It’s happened before - so many times in fact that she’s lost count - and she’s familiar with the lacing pain of old wounds bleeding open, and the brittle taste that fills the mouth. The difference this time is that it breaks for someone else. Once this waking nightmare is over Kara will remember what she didn’t do, and Lena knows that it will haunt her for as long as she draws breath. 

She hopes she will be able to help her pick the pieces up.

“What?” Kara chuckles. “Don’t tell me you feel sympathy for somebody you don't even know.” 

“Of course I do!” Lena bristles with affirmation, closing the distance between them despite the stomach-twisting fear she’s trying to keep under control. “And so does the Kara I know. The Kara I  _ married _ .”

Her wife snorts and rolls her eyes dramatically. 

“Oh, please.” She spits the words between clenched teeth and, when she turns enough that their eyes meet, Lena can see her jaw flexing. “As if this death was more important than the other thousands that happened at the same exact time, in entirely different places! Is it the fact that this affected one of our  _ upstanding _ citizens?” 

Lena wets her lips and makes no reply. Kara advances on Lena until her shadow blots out the moon. 

“I’ll tell you why you care so much. You care because of commonality. Because you and this person share at least one tiny thing. It’s easier to stop caring about the ones you cannot keep a tally on. Easier to forget.”

When she’s done with her tirade Kara is panting. Her chest heaves, breath misting white in front of her face as it leaves her mouth. Ensconced within her ribs are lungs that could survive the harshness of the void, and yet to Lena she looks as winded as a regular human being after a marathon.

She thinks back to the vials that she keeps inside the penthouse’s safe, wondering for a moment if - by running to it as fast as she could - she’d make it in time to get one and a syringe to go with it.

But Kara has already righted herself, a smirk playing across her lips as if she knows exactly what Lena’s thinking.  

“Except that for me they’re all equally close, and I can forget none of them. The way I’m built doesn’t allow it.”

Lena hears a hint of sadness in her words, and knows that  _ her  _ Kara lurks somewhere underneath this imitation, but in a moment it’s gone and the sardonic smile is back in place.

“You know nothing of me.” She tilts her chin up and squares her shoulders, the way her mother taught her to and that she hates. 

“No?” Kara cups her cheek, her touch surprisingly gentle. “I know how much you strive to be  _ good _ . To be everything that a Luthor isn’t even though you know they’ll never really trust you.” 

Lena grabs her by her wrist abruptly, and pulls her hand away. 

“Have you ever considered the fact I could be fooling them? Maybe I’m everything they suspect.” She shrugs, letting go of her wife’s wrist. Kara’s arm drops to her side.

“But what can they do about it, if they can’t prove it.”

“Ohhhh, no. No.  _ No _ .” Blonde hair whip across her face as she shakes her head. “I  _ know _ you. You want to be good, you’ll even put yourself in danger to prove that you are. And then, like everyone else, you’ll expect me to save you.” 

She turns her back on Lena, and it’s like the closing of a door.

“You’ll beg me to.”

Tears prick at her eyelids but she pushes them back, clinging to the thought that - as cutting as they are - these words do not belong to the one she gave her heart to. 

Lena can’t afford to be weak now.

“How arrogant of you.” She walks around Kara in a circle, so that her wife has no choice but to look at her. “to be so sure you know me inside out, while implying that I don’t know you at all.”

Without warning Kara grabs her, pulling her flush against her body. Her flesh is hot despite the layers of clothing still separating them, and Lena feels like Icarus.

Perhaps she’s flying too close to the sun too.

“I thought you liked a bit of cockiness.” Kara’s lips brush against her own in the whisper of a kiss. 

“I do.” Lena leans in, mouth skimming across Kara’s cheek and pressing against her wife’s ear. “But smugness is annoying.”

“I’ll prove it to you, how well I know you.” Unfazed, Kara strokes her cheek again, fingers tracing a path along her lower lip. “If you will come with me.” She snickers drily and takes a step back, extending a hand in invitation.

“I mean, if you know me as well as you say trust shouldn’t be a problem, right?” 

Lena takes the offered hand. 

Inwardly she’s terrified - achingly aware of how frail her pulse feels as it beats beneath Kara’s fingers as they close around her wrist. To the woman facing her, her body has the consistency of paper - as intricate an origami as it is, still quite easy to unfold at all the wrong angles. 

Kara could squeeze a hand around her wrist until her bones grate against each other and are slowly ground to dust. Or she could pick Lena up and throw her over the balustrade and to her death. After all a body is a negligible weight for someone who can stop a plane’s descent with her bare hands.

Her wife draws her close again, and she makes sure that Lena sees her doing it, arms going around her and lifting her up bridal-style. 

There is more than a touch of the theatrical in the way Kara leaps atop the marble rail that runs along the balcony, and walks onto thin air. 

They don’t plummet or fall, simply hovering for a moment before they start to move. Forward at first, in zig-zags fast enough to make Lena’s eyes water, tears leaving icy tracks down her cheeks. She licks salt from her lips, and the next moment all breath is knocked out of her as they ascend. 

Blood goes to her head and her sight dims as they climb past the top of the highest skyscraper in National City. She buries her face in Kara’s shoulder, the wind like a slap against her cheekbones. It whistles louder than a banshee around them, and its icy fingers find their way under Lena’s clothes, threatening to flail the skin off her. 

Kara doesn’t stop and, when Lena dares a peek, the city is a splash of twinkling lights down below, strands of cloud like spun sugar drifting on the wind to turn the night into a hazy dream around them. 

They are high enough for her to feel light headed, lungs rimmed with frost with each breath she takes, but Kara’s body is hot enough against her own to ward off most of the cold. 

It’s not the first time her wife has carried her like this, but Lena has never been this high - not out of a helicopter or a plane at least. She peers up, and Kara’s eyes are bright enough to rival the stars at her back, her irises streaked through with malevolent red. 

She winks back at Lena, like someone who is in on a big secret they tease but never share, then she bends down, lips brushing a fleeting kiss to her forehead. 

“Now let me show you.”

Her hands open and she lets Lena go.  


	2. Reckoning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Falling to her death, Lena has time for reflection. Will Supergirl swoop in to save her? Or is she too far gone under the seductive spell of the red kryptonite?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Valentine's Day, even though it's a bit hard for me all considering, and happy reading. 
> 
> \- Dren

_ Weightless _ .

That’s what Lena feels for a few exhilarating moments, seemingly suspended in the space that divides the earthly and the divine. She knows that – logically – gravity is already tugging her downward, towards the skyscrapers and the cars filling downtown’s streets even at such a late hour. Towards the people that populate the sidewalks, on their way home, or to dinner, or to see that late night movie showing they’ve meat to catch for a while - unaware to the last man of the tragedy unfolding over their heads.

Kara is a hinted silhouette against the velvet of the night sky, the stars above crowning her in the clear-cut light of diamonds.

A cloud drifts lazily across the moon, gauze-thin and puffy like spun sugar, but it’s enough to plunge Lena into shadow. When she can see again, Kara is nothing but a speck of truer black against the darkness.

She is well and truly falling now, the wind whipping her hair across her face, into her eyes and mouth, its piercing wail blotting out her screams.

Except that she’s not screaming, the force of the fall squeezing all breath out of her chest, making it impossible to voice the terror that settles like a plague inside her bones.

Caught between warring currents, her body is thrown from side to side, flipped and tossed until she comes to be in the opposite position of that in which she started. Lena can’t decide if witnessing the path of her demise is better than plummeting in ignorance, but as her eyes catch sight of the city, drawing ever closer, she finds herself enraptured by a spectacle of metal and blazing lights.

National City glows in the moonlight, as silver-lined and otherworldly as something out of a fairy tale would be. Its multicolored lights reflect and bounce upon the flowing waters of the river, gemstones carelessly discarded by the hand of a capricious God.

A sudden thought strikes her, and Lena cranes her neck to throw a look over her shoulder, wondering if the trajectory of her descent is marked by trails of fire, as if she were a comet that - grossly incandescent - melts the night around it while it falls.

_ Nothing _ . 

No fires, nor banners of flame heralding her end. 

She is going to die alone, Lena realizes. She’ll crash into the pavement without a sound, a gruesome form of rain. 

_ Not the kind of exit you’d want for me, right Mother? _

Lena would laugh, but the pressure of the wind against her chest has become crushing. Her heart beats too fast, a sparrow slowly crumpled by unfeeling fingers made of bone, and blood is rushing to her head in a roar not unlike that of a waterfall. 

She clings to scraps of consciousness by her fingernails, refusing to close her eyes against the air digging into the flesh of her face. The city is ever closer, the skyscrapers growing around her from toys to silent monoliths of steel and glass. Lena can actually tell what color the cars streaking under her are now and makes a game of counting them.

How hilarious that her last moments on this earth will be spent like this. 

Something collides with her, warm and strong, and above all familiar.

Lena is knocked off her descending path, her fall halted almost instantly. Her body decelerates hard enough that awareness is momentarily throttled out of her. 

When she comes to, Kara is holding her much the way she did right before she let her fall, and they are standing on the top of a building, the city sprawling at their feet like a blanket made of light. 

Her wife, skin lit from within by the lambent red of the kryptonite poisoning her thoughts is poised like a conqueror about to fall upon the citizens in conquest, and Lena is her first prisoner.

“You didn’t beg.” Kara says begrudgingly surprised. She lowers Lena to her feet before pushing ice encrusted strands of hair from her brow. Her touch is fever-hot and, despite the inherent danger Kara exudes, Lena leans into it. 

“I told you,” Lena pulls back with effort, willing her spine not to bend. Words leave her lips in a shuddering mess, her teeth chattering so violently she almost bites into her tongue as she speaks, “you don’t know me at all.”

“I know one thing.” Kara pulls her close, one hand undoing the clasps that keep her cape in place so that she can wrap it around Lena’s shivering frame. 

“And what is that?” 

“You are the only one of them worth saving.”

Without the cape billowing at her back, Kara appears diminished. Not the conquering warmonger anymore, but a foot soldier which may have survived her battles physically unscathed while her heart bears all the wounds that eyes can’t see. 

There is something tragically beautiful within that train of thought. Something that makes Lena ache to shelter her fallen godlet. What Kara told her back in their apartment comes to mind and she wonders if the angels of old fell to darkness the same way. 

Whether they had just been tired of acting upon God’s grievances for Him and not greedy as the church would have one believe. 

“What?” Kara asks, brow drawing downward when she catches her staring. 

_ You’re beautiful.  _ She wants to say.  _ I love you. _

But right now Kara is made entirely of the void one finds between two stars. Harshness and malice are the languages she speaks and understands, but Lena can tell from the way her jaw is set that she won’t stand for softness.

And yet giving her cloak away was chivalrous, and her hands linger - gently so - on top of Lena’s shoulders.

“Oh nothing really. Just basking in the fact that I was right and you were wrong.”

Lena paints the most shit-eating grin she can across her face. 

Inside she yearns for their bed and the embrace of the wife she chose, the beaming woman who squeals when she sees a puppy cross the street and cries at tv shows. 

Kara’s hands move away from her, and she folds her arms over her chest, lips petulantly pursed. 

“Weren’t you telling me that smugness is annoying like, ten minutes ago?” 

“Only when you practice it, dear.” Lena reaches out, patting Kara’s cheek with an insolence she knows she will end up paying for. 

Predictably, a storm sweeps the planes of Kara’s face, the crimson lacing her flesh pulsing with sudden anger. Its glow is bright enough to leave spots dancing in Lena’s eyes. 

It takes several moments before she can finally blink them away. 

When her vision clear she meets Kara’s red-blue glare with a doe-eyed one of her own.

“I was also thinking about how much I want you.” Her voice lowers seductively and she deliberately steps inside Kara’s personal space, the air between them quivering with heat as if she were standing in front of an open furnace. 

A plan takes shape inside her head, and she adopts the same intimidating posture she uses when facing a room full of shareholders who circle her like sharks, and would eat her alive given the chance. Lena is cold, weary, and truthfully she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to feel warmth ever again. The heat coming off of Kara’s body draws her in - a moth willing to immolate herself on the flame of a lone candle, but the frost coating her bones refuses to melt in the slightest. 

If she can get Kara back inside their penthouse, and distract her long enough to recover the vials of antidote perhaps…

Lena doesn’t know if she’ll succeed, and she doesn’t linger on the far more likely possibility that this brooding goddess will tear her apart the moment she catches onto her plan. 

But one thing is certain - she cannot allow her to smell blood. 

“Do you now.” 

Kara’s fingers close around her chin and force her head back painfully, her wife’s breath scalding as it slides along her throat. 

“I think you’re lying.” Kara presses her lips to Lena’s pulse point, incisors scraping at her skin with the promise of a bite that doesn’t come. 

Lena cannot hold back a gasp, but Kara simply laughs and pulls away, maudlin and despondent. Her blue eyes wound Lena like shards cut from the stars themselves. 

“I think you’re scared.” Kara continues, licking at her upper lip lasciviously, “that I could take you on a whim if I chose to. I could force you on your knees upon this roof and fuck you raw, until you beg for me to stop with your knees scraped and bleeding.” Shadows seem to gather around her as she speaks, until the only thing Lena can see of her is the scarlet kryptonite boiling in rivulets across her silhouette like lava. 

Embers of a deeper red smolder deep inside of Kara’s eyes, and Lena is reminded of a demon’s iconography. Her family owns quite the collection of old manuscripts, and these figures that promise bliss and the flensing of muscle from bone in the same breath have always fascinated her.  _ Succubi _ her mother called them when she’d asked. 

Lena wonders which of the two things it’ll be with Kara. 

“I could do every dirty, little thing I could think of.” Kara’s grin is a flash of white in the assembled darkness. “And there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

“Oh.” Lena breathes, closing the distance. She sneaks her arms around Kara’s waist and it’s like grasping at the sun. “I am terrified.” She places a chaste kiss at the corner of her wife’s mouth, and Kara’s barbed grin softens a fraction.

“Where would the thrill be if I wasn’t?” She steps back with a theatrical shrug and opens her arms in the same way of a supplicant.

_ Please let her swallow the bait. _

Despite the fascinations of her youth, Lena does not believe that gods exist, nor that life beyond death is split into two. The stark contrast of Heaven and Hell is far too simplistic for the scion of a family that lives by shades of grey. 

Yet in that moment she prays as fervently as a believer, and her heart slows to a calmer beat, in what she chooses to interpret as a sign that hidden forces are at work. 

_ Strange is the place where one finds comfort under duress. _

Kara quirks an eyebrow, feigning surprise. 

“Miss Luthor!” Her eyes gleam with the viciousness of a tiger stalking prey. “Perhaps there is more darkness inside you than I thought.” 

“I told you. You don’t know as much of me as you claim.”

Kara snorts and, without warning, picks her up. 

“I know enough to have married you.”

They levitate steadily, going high enough over the city that Lena’s head starts to spin again. The comfort she felt as Kara mentioned their marriage - that there is a part of Kara that remembers the life they built together - fades away, substituted by the fear that her wife intends to drop her again, rinsing and repeating in a perverted cycle until she breaks. 

Kara doesn’t speak as they fly, but her hold around Lena’s body doesn’t slacken, and when she calms enough to look for landmarks she realizes they are headed back towards their home. 

They almost never get to go home together - not with their marriage being a secret so closely kept - and so despite the circumstances, Lena savors the moment. Flying under the moonlight would feel romantic if it wasn’t for the fact she lives under the rule of a creature that could kill her on a whim. 

It’s something she’s always been aware of - Kara’s immeasurable strength - but that has never rattled her quite the way it does tonight. Without the light of her morals to guide her, Kara is fickle like a child who’d rip wings off butterflies for sport.

But perhaps her wife is right about her darkness, because the thought arouses her as much as it is terrifying. 

Lena hopes that Kara cannot see how her cheeks burn, but the quiet chuckle coming from her wife tells her that she is at least aware of the effect she’s having. 

Where Kara’s fever-tainted body failed to dispel the chill wrapped around her bones, her own arousal does and, as wetness gathers at her core, Lena burns up, consumed by flames that rival the red kryptonite for brightness. 

They touch down atop the balcony from which they started, Kara’s feet as light as feathers as she briskly walks them inside. Her steps are so weightless she doesn’t even disturb the broken glass strew across the hardwood, her feet carrying them both towards the bedroom. 

She lays Lena in the middle of the bed with unexpected tenderness, hunger stretching her face taut until her cheeks seem hollowed out by famine. 

“We’ll see how thrilled you’ll be after I am done with you.”

Lena can’t decide whether she means it as a promise or a threat. 

  
  
  
  



	3. Descent

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Back in the relative safety of the apartment, Kara goads Lena into revealing her darkest desires.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Soooo....it's actually a bit more than 3 chapters. Hopefully you won't mind too much.
> 
> \- Dren

The bedroom is a shadowy ensemble of edges barely dashed, at least from where Lena is reclining on the bed. She’d left the curtains drawn when she had gotten up that morning, still blissfully unaware of what the end of her day would be like, and the heavy cloth – which is of a rich burgundy in the sunlight – perfectly obscures the city sprawling beyond the armored glass.

She and Kara exist in their own bubble, an immaterial void that is contained within the confines of the world around them, and yet feels like it’s light-years away from it. Maybe it’s because of the tiredness of her bones, or the ice in her hair finally melting away to run in chilling rivulets down the back of her neck, but a heaviness has settled on Lena’s chest – in sharp contrast to the absence of weight she felt as she was falling. She wishes she could close her eyes and go to sleep, and wake with sun rays filtering their way inside the bedroom, Kara’s head resting on her shoulder. The reality she’s living evaporated into a nightmare easy to dismiss.

Immobile, Kara towers at the foot of the bed, and even though she does not cast a shadow her aura serves the purpose well enough.

Forgetting the dazzling lights of the city, Lena’s eyes gradually adjust and, ever so slowly, she starts to pick out details in the kryptonite’s unsettling glow. What shakes her nerves the most is not the feeble quality of the light, its hue reminiscent of drying blood, but the rhythmic way in which it ebbs and grows, that is entirely predictable and so unlike the dance of the fire as it devours the kindling fed to it. The kryptonite’s gleam matches the tempo of Kara’s entire being, strengthening in time with her inhales, and dwindling down to nothing when her lungs empty of air. 

A sudden fear fills the back of Lena’s throat with bile; the antidote she helped Alex develop has not been tested, and she cannot help but wonder whether it will do more harm than good. What if the root-like veins of kryptonite dig far deeper inside Kara’s flesh than what her eyes can see? 

An entire ecosystem wrapped around that steel-wrought heart, one functioning on malice and dark thoughts instead of blood, but no less deadly once fatally shut down.

Lena would more readily choose her own death, than live a life without the woman she loves.  

Kara simply waits and, if she has an inkling of the war Lena is waging against herself, she gives no sign. Her hands rest easy on her hips and she stands with legs slightly apart as she rakes Lena’s frame like she would a conquered land. Under a gaze that’s meant to singe her skin, Lena quickens, her panties sticking to her folds as the fabric soaks up her arousal.

Her wife is an effigy, lit from within by the fires of her anger, and Lena knows they’ll either end consumed or be reborn as the flames trap them like insects in the amber of a tree.

“I can almost taste your heartbeat.” Kara wets her lips for emphasis.

“Anticipation is what has my heart beating so fast.” Lena purrs with far more confidence than what she feels.

Kara flashes a Cheshire-cat smile at her, and it doesn’t take much of a leap for Lena to imagine her horned and armed with flails as she readies for torture.

“Well?” She gathers her legs up and pushes them under herself, rising to her knees. Her hands splay on the duvet on either side of her thighs as she straightens her back. “Are you actually going to do  _ something _ , or was it just all talk?”

Reflexively, Lena squares her shoulders as she speaks, jaw flexed and teeth gnashing until her cheekbones hurt. She uses the same clinical tone she employs during her meetings, when she shuts down dissent through numbers and hard fact.

Kara doesn’t seem overly impressed and, if anything, her smile grows more indolent and lazy.

When she finally moves – and to Lena it feels like a new century dawns before she does – Kara is on the bed in a flurry of motion impossible to follow, a streak of red-edged lightning parting the murkiness around them as if it was made of silk.

Fingers grasp the front of Lena’s blouse, roughly enough to remind her how easily these same hands could break her spine, then the fabric is pulled and ripped apart.

Kara doesn’t even bother with the mother-of-pearl buttons holding the garment closed, and they pop all at once, scattering with a soft patter to the four corners of the room.

“That was very expensive, I’ll have you know.” Lena says with deliberate chagrin, lips pressed into a thin line.

“Whoops.”

Thumbs pushed firmly into the bared lines of Lena’s collarbone, Kara leans closer, breath fleeting like a caress against her cheekbone.

“My bad.” Her tone harbors no contrition whatsoever, eyes alive with the sort of gleeful mischief a child is filled with right before playing a particularly nasty prank.

They are both knelt on the bed now, but the worship Lena knows is about to occur is of a different sort from that reserved to holy places.

Kara’s lips press a kiss to her cheek, unexpectedly tender, fingers drawing idle circles across her skin, before she absently starts to play with the straps of Lena’s bra.

“I’d offer to buy you a new one.” With a flick of her tongue she leaves a wet trail along Lena’s cheekbone. The gesture is utterly obscene – yet, oh, so arousing all the same.  “But you always lament my wardrobe choices.”

“I think you’re confusing me with Cat Grant.” Lena dips her barbed response in jealousy, and, with an open-handed shove against her chest, pushes Kara away.

Truth be told, it’s not that much of an effort to fake it.

For a time Lena had seen Kara’s former boss as an adversary in love, which had been hard for her to stomach. Just like her, Cat Grant was a woman who had built her empire in a field that men ruled. Lena had respected her for that – she still does – but also had mistaken Kara’s obvious admiration for something other.

Kara chuckles, outwardly unperturbed, and for a moment the smile she regales Lena with is the soft one she’s used to seeing. The old Kara,  _ her _ Kara, comes to the surface, but then the kryptonite’s hold strengthens, and she’s gone, hidden like the sun behind a storm front.

“Now, now.” She tuts and wags an insolent finger under Lena’s nose. “There’s no need to be jealous. By the end of the night you’ll know you’re the only one I care to possess.”

She says the words as if Lena were a thing, a toy to be used for Kara’s pleasure. The threat her wife had uttered on the rooftop bolts through her mind in shape and detail so crystal-clear it’s painful, but at seeing herself presented on her knees and thoroughly debased, Lena isn’t filled by the disgust one would expect.

A primal desire builds within her, lancing through her heart with searing clarity. Her arousal – which had grown to an uncomfortable dampness as they travelled back to the penthouse – overflows the confines of her panties, and Lena grinds her thighs together as discreetly as she can. The shuddering breath pushing against her teeth is harder to contain and, when some of it escapes in a hiss, Lena curses inwardly.

She is determined not to give Kara the satisfaction of seeing exactly what she is doing to her, because to do so this soon would equal a defeat.

Her wife arrogantly tilts her chin and Lena finds herself irritated by the almost patronizing smirk plastered on Kara’s lips.  

Surprising herself she reaches out, fingers hooking around the torn fabric of Kara’s suit and tugging violently at the gaping rent where the S should be. Already weakened, the weaving of the cloth gives easily under her efforts, tearing with a loud, ripping sound. Beneath, Kara wears nothing, not having even bothered with a bra, and Lena swallows hard, the strands of pulsing kryptonite that hug the flare of her wife’s ribs, heightening the perfection of her breasts.

Kara’s body is a work of art under normal circumstances. Like this – illuminated by the lambent, hellish light of the kryptonite - it acquires a foreboding sort of beauty.

The ancients must have felt the same way - Lena reflects - when the volcano spat its guts into the air over Pompeii, and they’d realized it was too late to run.

It is too late for her as well, and she realizes it as soon as Kara’s jaw flexes, the shards of red within her irises flaring to a brighter, all-consuming hue.

The part of her that’s undiluted pride stares back in challenge and, despite the dangers, her next words are not at all accommodating.

“ _ Now _ we’re even.”

Lena chooses to provoke her, and damn the consequences.

She has time to fill her lungs with air before Kara is on her again.

The two of them are more or less the same in height and weight, but their similarities end there. Where Lena is curves toned by hours of training at the gym, Kara is hard with muscle gained through actual combat and her powers only help to turn her limbs to something more impervious than titanium.

Normally Lena is glad for it – with the superhero life that Kara leads, it means she seldom has to worry about her getting hurt – but now that her wife’s strength is turned against her, she’s easily overpowered.

She finds herself on her back so fast that all breath is knocked out of her, and a moment later Kara’s weight pins her in place as her wife straddles her hips, the mattress giving gently under them.

Kara somehow traps both of her flailing arms with one of her own, throwing her forearm across both of Lena’s wrists while she struggles – mostly just for show –  to block her hands above her head.

With her free hand, Kara makes quick work of Lena’s bra, the lace rending like paper as she fists it and tugs down, knuckles grazing towards her navel in a tantalizing path.

She has barely time to mourn the loss of another article of clothing, when Kara’s lips meet her own, their mouths crushed together as her wife seeks entrance with a powerful sweep of her tongue.

Lena’s lips part readily in welcoming, and she draws Kara’s tongue in with greed, a whimper building at the back of her throat. Kara wastes no time deepening the kiss and, once she’s well and truly  _ trapped _ , Lena bites into her mouth, sucking her tongue with a slow, dragging tease that rips a satisfying moan from deep within her wife’s chest.

They kiss until a fire starts at the edges of Lena’s lungs, Kara’s lips lingering on hers as her mouth hangs agape, chest heaving as she desperately gulps down air.

Her eyes screw tightly shut, and she fights with vertigo and desire, the brush of Kara’s bare breasts against her own the sweetest form of torture.

After she’s finally regained a semblance of composure, Lena opens her eyes, feeling at her lower lip with the tip of her tongue. Kara had bitten back when they ended the kiss and, as pain flares up deliciously, Lena tastes copper.

She’s conscious that Kara follows the movement enthralled, watching her through a tousled wave of wheat-gold hair.  What Lena can see of her eyes, are pools of a blue so darkened by lust they veer closer to the obsidian of midnight, pupils blown wide open.

The ruddy glow of the kryptonite slashed across her cheeks in lieu of war paint only serves to highlight how bottomless her gaze is.

Kara hovers only inches from her, breathing her every exhale and, when she bridges the gap between them for another kiss, Lena has to catch herself before she winces. She expects another bite, another flare of blinding pain and – while her body is primed to welcome it – she also longs for the gentleness Kara usually displays between the sheets.

Perhaps something of it shows on her face, because Kara cups her cheek with the same hand that wrought disaster upon her clothes, and kisses her with a softness Lena had thought this version of her would not be capable of. Her tongue laves across the cut she has inflicted on Lena’s lip, sending an endless shiver to wrack her spine, and the pressure Kara is exerting on her wrists lessens just enough for her to wiggle free, hands finding purchase around her wife’s strong shoulders.

“You can feel the darkness stir inside you, can’t you Lena?” Kara breaks away to whisper seduction in her ear, breath trailing like hot steam against Lena’s skin.

She doesn’t know whether it’s the heat of Kara’s body pressed into her own, or the warmth of the blankets under them, but her skin is sheened with sweat and, when she tries to reply, her throat hurts as if she’d eaten sand.

All that Lena can do is nod, a fresh wave of arousal rendering her panties beyond soaked. She is sure her slick has stained the skirt she is still wearing too, and Kara must have had her same thought because she shifts, one thigh pushing relentlessly between her own.

“You are so drenched for me.” Kara states evenly, thigh dragging agonizingly slow against Lena’s core. Her hips buck up as her body seeks more friction, and Kara eases away with a smirk.

“It’s tiring to be always in control, always so good and well-behaved, isn’t it Lena?”

She jerkily nods again, fighting down the need that urges her to rub the entirety of her body against Kara, pleading words forming on her lips.

Without warning, her wife’s hand darts under her skirt, rolling it up to reveal the mess beneath. When Kara’s fingers graze the inside of her thighs, she whimpers and fails to stop her legs from falling open in surrender.

“I want to hear you say it, Lena.” Kara entices against her jaw, teeth grazing down her neck. “How you want to give in to all the dark impulses inside you. Tell me.”

“Yes!” Lena practically screams her assent, eyes screwed shut and head thrown back in abandon. “I want…everything you said…just…”

“Just what?”

She can almost  _ hear _ the widening of Kara’s smirk.

“ _ Just fuck me _ .”

She rears up to catch Kara’s mouth in another bruising kiss, smirking against her lips when she feels her mouth shape into a little O of surprise. It’s hard not to lose herself into the heat of Kara’s body, the insistence of her tongue as it tangles with hers, but somehow Lena manages.

The moment she feels Kara soften against her she strikes, legs rising to clamp around her wife’s hips as she flips their position, just the way her self-defense instructor taught her to.

_ It was money well spent after all. _

Lena waits for Kara to react, to throw her off effortlessly - perhaps with a cruel laugh as she does so -  and force her arms down so that she can her way with her. 

She will admit that there’s a part of her that fills with eagerness at the prospect.

Kara does laugh, but it’s a wild, beautiful thing, far removed from the jagged sound that Lena had been expecting. 

“Oh look at you.” Her wife purrs appreciatively, hands running along her thighs to push her skirt even further up around her waist. “If only they could see what hides beneath the prim and proper girl that you pretend to be!” 

Her smirk flashes, white and scorching in the darkness, one of her hands cupping Lena’s breast. When she feels Kara’s fingers close around her puckered nipple she shivers, only to arch up a moment later as it is tugged relentlessly, a hoarse scream leaving her lips.

“What do you think they’d say?” 

“Oh.” Lena bends down, panting with her own desires, and her hair, which during her flight have escaped the severe bun she had styled them into, fall in locks around their faces like a showering of feathers. 

She kisses Kara with all the ardor that she can find within herself, pulling away with a whimper that promises far darker pleasures when her wife tries to deepen the kiss. 

They are laying in such a way that all she has to do to grab a fistful of the heavy curtains barring off the night, is throw an arm out. Her fingers claw at the cloth until she finds purchase and, sensing her intentions, Kara’s hand covers her own, adding superhuman strength to her purpose.

“Why don’t we show them?” 

The velvet gives with a rending sound, moonlight flooding the room, and they bare themselves to the night that lays in wait beyond the window panes.

They are far too high above the city for anyone to spy on them, but it is still a thrilling thought, one that sends another wave of arousal to drip between Lena’s legs.

Kara’s hand closes around the scruff of her neck, pulling her in for another kiss, and Lena doesn’t have any more time for titillating fantasies, as the fingers urgently pushing her panties to the side and stroking along her slicked folds are all too real. 

They’re the only thing that matters.


	4. Darkness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dismantled by Kara's touch, Lena finds some truth about herself.

The kiss continues until Lena’s vision dims from lack of air. 

Black vines grow at the corner of her eye, expanding across her field of vision until the night she’s let inside her bedroom turns pitch black. The glow of the city, which makes it into the room despite the height, burns down to nothing, and the only guiding light that is left to her is red. 

A red replicated within the roar of blood inside her ears. A red that envelops her spine with scorching heat - like that of an all-consuming fire - whenever Kara’s fingers draw patterns along her swollen, aching folds. 

Her wife’s touch is as cruel as it is careful, fingers not coming even remotely close to brush her clit the way that Lena craves. 

The moment she pushes her hips forward, seeking to force Kara into giving her what she wants, her wife’s hand is swiftly removed. 

It lands, unexpected, in a stinging slap across her ass. 

“Patience.” Kara chastises with a smile that’d cut through steel. “Whether you learn it the hard way, is up to you.” 

Lena is still straddling her, weight resting on her forearms and yet, as Kara’s hands grab and knead her ass through the fabric of her skirt, she feels as if she was the one posturing as bottom. 

And perhaps she is, Kara letting her believe that she could regain control through a mere matter of position. 

The smirk her wife regards her with gains a light of infuriating mockery, and Lena’s fingers dig into the sheets, knuckles blanching until they begin to hurt. 

An image forms inside her mind, one conjured from the darkness she carries within by virtue of being born a Luthor. Or maybe it’s a curse that she’s managed to keep from coming to light by force of will alone, to which she is succumbing now that Kara’s touch is so convincingly dismantling her. 

Lena watches - helpless - as the phantom of her hands closes around Kara’s throat, her wife’s grin erased by a gasp as air is crushed from her. 

She sees her own horrified expression reflected in Kara’s eyes, and even though she knows that she would never hurt Kara that way, she can’t do nothing but reel away regardless.

Kara’s arms go around her almost protectively, and she finds herself cradled against her wife’s chest. Lena presses her ear against Kara’s flesh, the thunderous heartbeat that powers that otherworldly being mixing with her own, more fragile one.

“It’s alright to let your darkness show.” Kara croons, lips pressed against the top of Lena’s head, her earlobe, the sharp curve of her jaw. “I know it’s  _ them _ you really wish to crush.” 

The people that even now are dreaming dreams of fleeting glory and revenge, self-assured within their beds as they take their protector for granted. 

If they only knew.

When Kara pushes her to her knees, wiggling out from under her, Lena doesn’t resist. She wants to, fretting that if she cedes the little control she has left she will be lost, but her wife’s words pour like poison in her ears, lulling her into paralysis. 

And yet, it’s the truth of them that holds her prisoner most of all, like a fly mired within a drop of amber.

“You do so much for them.” Kara kneels behind her, lips trailing fervent kisses down the side of Lena’s neck. 

The gesture leaves her shaking. 

“How many vaccines has L-Corp help develop over the years? How many fundraisers has your money fueled?” Kara’s fingers work along her shoulder blades and spine, playing the spaces between her bones as she would the ivory keys of a piano. Lena tries to hold out, but her muscles release tension that had years to accumulate, like a strata of ancient ruins weighing down her bones, and she slumps against Kara’s heated body, grateful despite circumstances.

“You’ve cleaned your name a hundred times over and for what?” Kara’s voice remains soft, but it’s now the whisper of a blade abandoning its sheath. “For them to look at you out of the corner of their eye. Suspicious, never trusting, always waiting for your true colors to be revealed.” 

The cold exuding from Kara’s words would freeze her heart over, Lena is sure of it, if it wasn’t for the scorching heat of the kryptonite.

“They expect you to be bad, just as they so desperately pray for me to be good. Humanity has a need to believe in something, and now that they know that God doesn’t exist we’re the next best thing.” 

Lena is at a loss for a reply. Kara’s words are so clear, so logical. The devil himself could not have swayed her more thoroughly. And if her arguments weren’t convincing enough, Kara’s fingers rob her of her remaining will. 

Kara’s hands have moved to Lena’s front, cupping and fondling her breasts in a way that makes her want to melt upon the bed. 

“I say we turn the tables on them.” She can almost hear the smirk drip off those words, “and we remind them that gods do not give in to demands, but pretend worship.” 

“Just like what you’re about to show me now?” Lena manages with a flash of boldness she really doesn’t feel. In truth she’s started to question the sanity of her own plan. She wonders whether the kryptonite is seeping inside her bones through the air she and Kara share, to eat away at her cells like a cancerous growth. To consume what is left of her ability to form coherent thought.

Her intent had been to be tire Kara out somehow and recover the antidote, but she is starting to believe she’ll end up immolated atop the fires of her lust. 

The most marrow-shaking truth about this, is the realization that a big part of her accepts her role as willing sacrifice.

A sound escapes from deep within her chest, something that Lena feels building between her lungs. It expands and fills each and every nook and cranny of her being, like water spouting from a pipe that – rotten by age and disrepair – suddenly gives way to its own internal pressure.

Half exhale, half defeated wail, the noise makes it past teeth she fails to shut around it, hot tears streaming down her cheeks at the stark, inevitable failure she can’t help but envision for herself.  

The plan, which had seemed so practicable before, lays in ruins at her feet, but Lena knows that she will try to piece it back together and attempt to make it work regardless. She owes it to the woman she knows still exists beneath the kryptonite to try. To fight against impossible odds just as  _ her _ Kara would.

Kara’s mouth stops in its tracks, lips brushing across Lena’s pulse point before her wife latches onto it, sucking gently. Kara’s hands, which had been tormenting her breasts to the point that a dull pain had started to spread across her chest, turn gentle and soothing. Lena finds herself held in a way that’s more reminiscent of the Kara of old than this unforgiving creature who bears edges that cut her worse than any diamond.

“Worshipped, yes.” Kara murmurs against her skin, “by the hands and mouth of one that knows your light would not exist without shadow.”

“I… don’t understand.”

Kara laughs softly, but the sound lacks scorn. Rather, she talks with the patience of someone leading a fool to water that’s sitting right beneath their nose. “You strive to be so tooth-rotting good, and therefore you are, solely because you are aware of how easy it would be for you to be despicable.”

She cards a hand through Lena’s sweat-soaked hair, pushing errand strands away from her eyes.

“You were born for evil. Trained for it. Yet you rebelled with all your might and chose a much harder path for yourself, knowing that it’d make you a pariah among your own clan. Aware that people only see your last name anyway.”

It makes sense in a way. Had Lena been born to average parents, not good or bad but a grey mix of the two, would she have fought to be a span above any run-of-the-mill good doer?

“And you?” She asks, fingers seeking to intertwine with Kara’s own. “What were you born for?”

Lena doesn’t know whether she seeks Kara’s touch to give reassurance or be reassured, but when her wife’s hand closes around hers – gently as if she was holding the thinnest porcelain instead of flesh – she has confirmation that the woman she gave her heart to isn’t gone, but barely dormant.

“Oh I was born to be a  _ hero _ .” Kara’s tone holds all the bitterness of someone who has discovered they’re the butt of one mean joke. “Except that when they explained what a beacon of hope the House of El is meant to be, they forgot to mention the price I’d have to pay to keep that sigil shining.”

“They didn’t tell me,” she continues, voice so low that Lena has to physically strain in her embrace to hear it, “that I would hear my planet die each time I try to sleep. Let me assure you – sometime I wish I had not discovered what I am capable of. To possess the strength I do, and know that under a different sun it means nothing, is worse than any curse.”

Kara grows quiet, cheek pressed against her own, and Lena feels wetness tickle at her skin.

Tears, but she’s almost afraid to turn her gaze and look, for fear that even Kara’s pain will be tainted red.

“You are right.” She turns her voice as hard as Kara’s was moments ago. “We owe nothing to no one.”

Lena had thought at first that, since Kara has seemingly forgotten who she is  meant to be, it’d fall to her to be a reminder. But the more they talk of moral compasses, the more she realizes that the side of Kara that she’s seeing has always been there, much the way she’s been aware of the darkness her heart is capable of, if given the chance. 

Kara is a hero because she understands how easily her powers could be used to crush and dominate instead of granting shelter. So far, she’s simply chosen the latter, and no fate nor higher callings have anything to do with it.

What remains to be seen is how broken Kara will be, after this trial is over.

“And what about the worship you were asking of me?”

A trace of amusement resurfaces, faint underneath the jaw-clenching pain Kara is obviously feeling.

“Oh, you’re not getting out of that.” Lena turns her face, kissing Kara’s cheek until the tears staining her skin are cleaned away. “But I offer mine in return.”

She closes her eyes and waits in trepidation, almost not daring to breathe on the off chance that her quickened heartbeat will betray her. On one hand she hopes what she’s been plotting all along can still be salvaged, on the other she yearns to come undone under Kara’s touch. 

If only for an hour of their lives, Lena wants to forego what’s right in favor of existing solely for each other.

“How can I resist, when you put it like that?” 

Kara moves their clasped hands downward, and Lena almost bursts out laughing when she notes she’s still wearing her skirt and underwear beneath. Honestly, she’d completely forgotten about that. 

“Are you going to tear those off me too?” She can’t help that a soft smirk gathers at the corner of her mouth, “at this rate you’ll leave me with no wardrobe to speak of.” 

“Hmmm.” 

Kara’s fingers leave her own, to play in a teasing line along the waistband of her skirt. 

“That wouldn’t be such a bad thing now, would it?” 

“It would, if you aim to parade me around naked.” Lena scoffs, eyes rolling slightly. Kara’s fingers hover next to the skirt’s zipper, before she makes a point of pulling it down.

Delicately.

“Who talked about parading? I shall keep you in this bedroom indefinitely.” Kara pauses for a moment, hand sneaking under Lena’s undone skirt. 

“As my prisoner.” She adds, her questing hand splayed over Lena’s quivering thigh.

The words are light with jest, but when Lena gazes into her wife’s darkened eyes, the hunger she finds swirling in their depths - akin to the most perfect storm she’s ever seen - leaves her trembling with a mix of fear and anticipation. 

The moment Kara’s hand finally trails upwards to sneak underneath panties so beyond ruined that Lena’ll have to toss them once they are done, she lets out a moan, rolling her hips forward again.

This time Kara doesn’t withhold what she desires, finally allowing her fingers to brush against Lena’s aching clit. Her touch remains teasing and feather-like, her other hand closing around one of Lena’s breast roughly by contrast. 

Kara sets a bland pace to start with, fingers scissoring expertly between Lena’s folds. She alternates circling Lena’s clit with sharper pinches to its tip, and each time her touch grows more demanding, she accompanies it with a savage tug to Lena’s breast. 

Pain and pleasure blend, two ropes far too intertwined to be unknotted, and Lena knows that - at least for the time being - she’s done for. 

Reason deserts her, until all that is left is a small, shuddering girl who can keep upright only thanks to the strong arms holding her close. 

The more Kara teases her, the faster Lena jerks her hips, gathering a little satisfaction in the fact that her ass grinds into her wife’s front when she rears back for each new thrust. Kara groans in her ear at the friction, her strangled grunts a counterpoint for the crescendo of her moans. 

“God…” Lena pants, almost beyond words. 

She tilts her head back, eyes rolling upward to meet Kara’s. The light she finds there is bright with a reverence not even the kryptonite embedded in the blue can strip away. It’s the same wide-eyed look Kara gave her the first time Lena begged to be filled, and her wife’s face is painted with the wonderment Lena saw when - surprising them both - she was the one to go down on one knee to ask Kara in marriage.

“ _ Please! _ ” 

She manages, hand rising to claw at Kara’s shoulder for support. 

“Please, Kara!”

Excruciatingly slow, Kara’s fingers leave her clit, parting her drenched folds with ease and slipping inside the tight, pulsing channel of her body. 

Lena screams. 

 


	5. Consequences

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The night comes to a close, and Lena swears to find whoever poisoned Kara with the Red-K.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here's the epilogue... at least for now.
> 
> Happy reading!
> 
> \- Dren

Lena screams until her lungs give out, completely empty. She screams until her vocal chords are fraying, and once her voice becomes a rasping hiss, Kara’s hand closes around her throat.

The gesture catches her by surprise, her heart beating like a hummingbird against the calloused warmth of Kara’s fingers. The hold is shocking enough to cause her churning hips to stutter and come to a stop, but she knows she will not bruise.

A part of Lena wishes that it did. To be marked by her wife’s hand so that the entire world would know who she has _chosen_ to belong to.

Her shoulders slump forward, and she hangs limp in Kara’s hold, like a puppet whose strings have been cut without warning. All that she can think about is the feeling of Kara’s finger, pumping in and out of her in a lazy sort of rhythm. Lena wants more, _needs_ more, to be stretched until the pleasure starts to burn uncomfortably, but the words to articulate what she yearns for desert her, and her mind burns down, collapsing on itself like a house set on fire.

Behind her, Kara shifts, and maneuvers her onto her back with a gentleness that leaves Lena entirely wrong-footed. The hand between her legs is withdrawn, Lena’s hips chasing its touch helplessly, and she finds her voice again, a disappointed wail leaving her lips.

Kara chuckles, raising her hand between them to show Lena the glistening results of her teasing, before popping her finger into her mouth and sucking it clean of Lena’s slick, with an obscene, arousing, slurp.

Lena’s cunt clenches in response.

The juxtaposition she finds in Kara’s actions makes Lena so dizzy that the bed seems to tilt beneath her, and she goes down on it without a word of protest. The mixture of teasing cruelty and tenderness is intoxicating, and Lena’s body quickens as she tries to imagine what else Kara has in store.

She rides anticipation like a high and, no matter what cost, she finds she doesn’t want to get down from it.

With a smirk, Kara grabs what remains of her clothes and tears them off of her, Lena squirming under her as a rush of gushing arousal splashes down her thighs. The sound of ripping cloth is sudden, but not completely unexpected, and Lena is too caught up in her desires to mourn the loss of another part of her wardrobe.

The world could go down in flames outside her window right this minute, and she wouldn’t give a damn.

She has eyes only for Kara, who has lifted a few spans into the air and hovers above her, beautiful and savage. Lit as she is by the glow of the kryptonite, Kara looks like one of the angels that surely followed Lucifer in his descent from Heaven, freed and indomitable as she takes a fragment of God’s light into herself, to shine it where she wants, rather than where she is commanded to.

“Not fair.” Lena blurts between gritting teeth, hips rutting into empty air. “You’re still half dressed.”

The top of Kara’s suit hangs in tatters from her shoulders and waist, the shredded cloth giving her the illusion of having wings as she floats effortlessly above the bed. The rest of her is still, woefully, covered, and Lena’s fingers twitch with the intent to tear her wife’s skirt apart as well.  

To her surprise, Kara gives a judicious nod.

“That’s fair.”  

Her hands move like a whirlwind and bits of cloth fall all over the bed, like a handful of confetti. It makes Lena burst into delighted laughter, this unconventional snowfall.

The laughter is cut short when Kara drops on her, their limbs locking together out of habit. Finally, _finally_ her wife’s naked body is pressed into her own, and when Lena’s hips jerk again her mound grinds into Kara’s, and both of them are a wet mess.

Lena tugs her down for a kiss, hands rising to frame Kara’s face as her fingers sift through locks of golden hair to keep her trapped in place. She has no need to exert pressure as Kara is more than willing to oblige her, their mouths meeting in a heated smear of lips that speaks of undiluted passion.

When she sucks on Kara’s tongue, Lena tastes lingering traces of her essence, and the saltiness makes her burn, her nerve endings blackened by the fire.

Kara smirks against her lips and Lena can only watch, helpless, as she takes both of her wrists, bringing them up over her head, hold tightening when she presses them into the bed.

“I will fuck you now.” Kara promises, eyes dark. “But if you move your hands, I’ll stop.”

Lena nods frantically, willing to agree to anything Kara suggests at this point. She’s pretty sure she’s beyond dripping, and she’s never felt this kind of ache between her legs. Craving to be filled until she cannot take one finger more. Taken. Fucked.

 _Used_.

The realization hits like a bucket full of ice in the middle of the summer, and Lena can’t stop her body from convulsing. She arches up, seeking friction, and her bones vibrate with need, bowstrings drawn to the point of snapping.

Kara stares, head cocked to the side as her eyes scour Lena’s face for confirmation she has been understood.

“Please” Lena’s hushed begging will have to be enough, because she isn’t sure her brain functions enough to offer more.

The grip around her wrists becomes iron right before Kara leans down to crash her lips against Lena’s, and it’s not long into the kiss before she tastes red.

The teasing resumes shortly after, the passing of Kara’s fingers against her core so light it sits on the verge of mocking. Lena cries out, her hips thrusting up without her consent until Kara grabs one of her sides and holds her down. Lena’s hands are free now, but she dutifully keeps her arms as they have been position, not sure she would survive if Kara denied her release.

It’s hard, and she shudders with the effort, her fingers opening and closing as she claws at nothing. She would almost prefer to be tied down - that way at least she’d have a length of rope to hold on to.

“Kara…” She begs, haltingly, when her wife’s fingers brush against her clit.

“Ask me,” Kara orders evenly, as two of her fingers slide down and she enters her again. She keeps a maddeningly slow pace, not thrusting hard enough, not reaching deep enough to offer Lena any reprieve. She comes close to all the spots Lena needs her at, and misses them on purpose.

“I need you to ask me Lena. You are such a _good girl_ for everyone else that you can be for me as well, can you not?”

There is a shit-eating grin plastered all across her lips, and Lena wishes she could do something to wipe it off her face.

Instead, she bites her lower lip almost to the point of breaking skin to stop a moan from escaping, keen on not giving Kara that kind of satisfaction. Her wife has her utterly at her mercy, but she doesn’t need to know. Besides, her trembling body tells the story well enough.

“Please, Kara. Let me-” She halts and has to fight to keep her hips from rolling upward, fearing that could also be taken as a sign of disobedience. Her thighs shake with waves of repressed pleasure that cut into her like knives and, in a gesture that reminds of the tender way the Kara of old has of making love, her wife rubs small circles atop her hips, until she can get herself under enough control to speak.

“Let me come. _Please_!”

“Wasn’t that hard, was it?”

Kara whispers it right in her ear as she leans down to lick away the frustrated tear that has formed at the corner of one of Lena’s eyes, and then, her fingers curl upwards, hooking into Lena’s front wall. The sudden pressure hard enough to have her gasps in shock. Kara’s fingers stroke, and stroke, and stroke as her teeth find skin to scrape against. She bites down on Lena’s neck, hard enough that she draws blood.

Hard enough that stars of pain are born behind Lena’s eyes as she is consumed by the raging flames of her own climax.

She screams, and has no energy nor will to fight it, as a second release follows her first. Her hands move of their own accord, digging at Kara’s back but, as she adds another finger in, her thrusts reaching a crescendo, she doesn’t seem to mind.  

**********************************

Five orgasms later, Lena manages to disentangle from Kara’s embrace, long enough to sit upright on the bed.

Kara watches her carefully, eyes narrowed.

“I just need to freshen up a little.” Lena shrugs. “Not all of us have unlimited stamina, you know?” She is sore, and marked all over, the impression of Kara’s teeth adorning her breasts and collarbone. Her bruises throb with exquisite pain, and even though she knows they will chafe against her clothes for days, no matter which expensive cashmere she decides to wear, Lena does not regret it.  

She is sweaty, skin sticky with traces of salt and her own come - her clit still throbs with the aftershocks of her last orgasm - and while she craves a bath and sleep, she’s trying to put distance between herself and Kara for a different reason.

Fueled by an hunger that seems bottomless, Kara doesn’t seem inclined to be on the receiving end of their lovemaking, and Lena is sure she’ll fall victim to exhaustion before she can salvage what is left of her plan.

Encouraged by Kara’s silence she stands on tottering legs, muscles shaking like jelly, and takes the first cautious step towards the bathroom.

Kara’s hand shoots out and grasps her by her wrist.

“You are not trying to get away, are you Lena?”

Bending down, Lena captures Kara’s lips in a searing kiss, then traces them up to her earlobe, painting her wife’s cheeks with the last strokes of her lipstick. She whispers into Kara’s ear; something that has been on her mind for quite some time, something _dirty_ that she has no intention to try tonight, but that she can use as bait.

“Oh... _OH_! Lena Luthor, you naughty, naughty girl!”

Kara barks a laugh and lets her go, shooing her toward the door.

“Just don’t take too long.” She instructs, blowing Lena a kiss as she retreats, before she flops onto her stomach, affording her a clear view of her weeping pussy.

Lena actually stumbles, and has to clear her throat.

God, but this brazen part of Kara makes her want to forget about the antidote.

**********************************

She goes and comes in a matter of minutes, not about to squander the one chance she has by loitering.

Kara is still how she has left her but, despite the fact that the syringe-equipped dispenser containing the antidote is small enough to be concealed in the palm of her hand, Lena does her best to keep her body angled slightly away from the bed.

She climbs on it in silence, straddling Kara’s ass before she can turn around.

“I was thinking,” she grinds down and Kara sighs, rising into her motion, “I’d make myself come all over your ass first. You know, so that I am all ready for what I mentioned before.”

“You think of everything, don’t you?” Kara purrs, contentment evident in her tone. Lena places her free hand on the middle of her wife’s back, hips rocking slowly forward, her mound leaving wet trails on Kara’s ass. She bends down, scattering soft kisses along the side of Kara’s neck, tongue gathering her lover’s taste into her mouth. It mingles with that of the tears she’s crying.

“I’m so sorry, Kara.”

She brings her other hand around, and the kryptonite-infused, carbonium needle of the syringe sinks into the flesh of Kara’s neck.

The reaction is immediate, and unbearable to watch. Kara rears up with a hoarse scream, one hand flying to clamp over the place of the puncture. She bucks, trying to throw Lena off, but her strength is waning rapidly, and she flops back on the bed, her scream tapering off into a wail. It’s a mercy not to see her face, pressed as it is into the pillow, but Lena can imagine the hurt and the betrayal, and the foam gathering at the corners of Kara’s mouth as she convulses.

Disgusted, Lena throws the spent syringe to the floor, where it tumbles out of sight with a clink of empty metal.

The vines of red kryptonite recede, leaving unblemished skin behind and, as Kara’s spasms lessen in intensity, Lena clambers off her, gathering her into the protective circle of her arms.  

“I’m here.” She whispers, heart breaking against the heaving of Kara’s chest. “I’m here Kara.”

_I’m sorry, baby. I’m so, so sorry._

And then.

_I’ll kill whoever did this to you._

Lena doesn’t say any of it, but for once she will make sure to uphold the Luthors’ reputation.

Kara dissolves into sobs, face buried into Lena’s neck. She tightens her hold and presses a soft kiss to Kara’s brow, knowing it will do no good.

Not right now.

There will be time to talk about the night they just had, about her drop from a great height and all the bruises, and Lena’s heart breaks again, because she knows that Kara will take none of it lightly and everything as her fault.

The truth about the lives that Kara did not save can wait till morning.

**********************************

She holds Kara for hours, so long into the night that she is witness to the moment the sky starts to turn from deep blue-black to washed out grey. At some point, the arm she’s wound around her shoulders falls asleep, Kara’s weight on it cutting off the blood flow, but Lena doesn’t move, unwilling to risk her wife jolting awake.

She won’t trade her comfort for Kara’s rest, not when she’s finally asleep - albeit fitfully. Not when her tears have tapered off, leaving a sticky saltiness behind. Dried out trails that Kara will be able to wash away come morning. A shame that the pain she feels, and the self-loathing run so much deeper than that.

Those will not be erased by a splash of warm water.

There is a mirror, hanging on the wall opposite the bed, a reflective surface so big it took three workers to install it when Lena had the penthouse renovated. She hadn’t really looked to it over the course of the night, save for the occasional, accidental glance. Flashes of their naked bodies, entwined in their love-making had greeted her, fragments of a puzzle telling her that yes, what could have been mistaken for a lucid dream had truly happened, but Lena had not lingered.

They say that mirrors are like windows, whether to other worlds or souls she isn’t sure, but Lena had been afraid to find the darkness held within her and Kara manifesting on the mirror’s surface.

A darkness that, at least in Kara’s case, she’s managed to contain thanks to the antidote.

As if she could perceive her thoughts, Kara shifts with a whimper, prompting Lena to coo in soft reassurance.  She cards her hand through Kara’s hair, working some of the knots loose as gently as she can before massaging her scalp with the tips of her fingers.

Gradually Kara quietens down, burying deeper under the covers Lena has thrown over them with a sigh. She’ll sleep for hours, even a superhuman body like hers needing time to recover from the shock that flushing the red kryptonite out of her system has caused. No amount of hours will make the truths Lena will eventually have to tell her any easier.

Her own body is a mass of dull aches, and leaden with fatigue, but sleep remains firmly out of reach. Like an impression of smoke on the wall that Lena knows exists, but cannot grasp. Again and again, her eyes go back to the mirror and, at seeing Kara so small and fragile-looking within the protective circle of her arms, the anger that has been simmering deep inside her gut, flares up.

Lena’s eyes flash dangerously in the growing light of morning, and her face – which is already waxen – pales further. With her hair tousled and knotted into ropes she looks like a  scion of Medusa, intent on pondering a revenge that’s cruel and cold enough to freeze Hell at least two times over.

It’s an expression she’s often seen inside her household, one that she went as far as to  practice in the sanctity of her room, back during a time in which she’d still been seeking approval.

_If only you could see me now, Mother. You would be proud._

**********************************

Two weeks have passed, but to Lena it feels more like a century. Kara has gone back to both her jobs, if not back to normal in the slightest but, as Lilian would say, appearances do matter.

Yet, Lena’s trained eye can see the changes. Some only she is privy to – the muted quality of Kara’s laugh when they are alone for example, or the way her wife’s fingers linger on her chest and collarbone when they are in bed, even though the bruises she inflicted are almost completely gone. A few of the things making up this new version of Kara are so minor they border on negligible, but there is a glaring one, that everyone has seen by now, although its true import remains unknown to most.

The S is missing from the front of Kara’s new suit.

Three days after what the two of them now called “the Red Incident”, her wife had come to Lena with a new design. There had been such a determined cast to her jaw, that Lena had agreed to the changes immediately.

Not that opposition would have done much good when Kara was being so clearly stubborn.

The suit’s modifications hadn’t ended there however. Kara had demanded a change of color too, from dark blue to blue-grey. And the cape…

Her cape is now the color of congealed blood, and every time she sees it, whether in person or on the news, Lena wants to cry.

Of course everyone but Kara’s sister is left scratching their heads (and maybe Maggie, but Lena doesn’t know how much Alex shared with her). The media are talking of a “rebranding” and “getting out from Superman’s shadow” but Alex and Lena know better.

It’s all part of Kara’s self-inflicted punishment for what she did.

Or rather, for what she failed to do.

The  GPS beeps once, and Lena pushes such thoughts out of her mind, taking one look around before she parks the rental car.

The docks are deserted this time of night, the city’s skyline so far removed across the water Lena has the impression of having stepped inside a different reality.

_Alex chose the place well._

Kara’s sister greets her on the doorstep of a warehouse. The building looks to have been in a state of abandonment for years, and the complete lack of windows ensures them the privacy they need.

Alex motions her inside, plunging them into darkness when she pulls a metal door shut behind them. She snaps a flashlight on and, without speaking, leads Lena deeper inside the building. The original space had been divided up in smaller rooms, and it’s within one – starkly illuminated in sharp contrast with the rest – that Lena comes face to face with the lead that Alex found for them.

“That’s him?”

With a split lip and both eyes almost completely swollen shut, the drug dealer doesn’t look all that impressive.

“Yep.” With the butt of her flashlight, Alex pokes the man in the sternum, making him grunt. “Although he claims he doesn’t deal in any alien substances.”

At the sound of Alex’s voice the man rouses himself further, tugging uselessly at the restrains that tie him to the chair he’s sitting on, before he gives up with a slump of his shoulders.

“Fuck you.” He snarls, spitting what looks suspiciously like a tooth on the floor. “I’m done talking.”

“We’ll see.” Eyes narrowed to slits, Alex takes a menacing step forward.

“Wait.” Lena places a hand on her shoulder, halting her in her tracks. The dealer had been talking to Alex, but something she is unable to name flashed through his eyes when they landed on her. Furthermore, it bothers Lena that she can’t place his accent. Despite the coarse language he employs, he sounds cultured to a fault, his english impeccable.

A man that could hail from anywhere and nowhere.   

“What’s this one going to do?” He grins her way, a flash of blood-stained teeth that’s full of insolence. “Torture me with a Louboutin?”

“You’d be surprised.”

Ignoring Alex’s frantic attempt at keeping her back, Lena steps up to the chair, so close to their prisoner that she can smell the reek wafting from his body.

No amount of cologne can mask the rancid scent of his fear.

Emotion flickers across his face again, and this time Lena can put a name to it.

 _Recognition_ – something which is not at all surprising, considering how often L-Corp has made headlines as of late.

Yet he doesn’t give her the star-struck look of someone crossing paths with a celebrity. His eyes hold no surprise at finding one like her in a place renown for being the thriving underbelly of the city, where everything from dirty money to drugs changes hands quicker than somebody can blink.

No, this nameless thug meets Lena’s searching gaze with the awareness he may have come to the end of the line. He evidently knows what the Luthor name entails – an experience he must have acquired first-hand.

She reaches out to cradle his face between both hands, her expression almost kind as she bends down to whisper in his ear.

“I will pay you triple what they gave you if you tell me who bought the substance from you.”

He turns his face, stubble tickling at her cheek as his lips move against her ear. They leave a trail of blood behind, but Lena doesn’t flinch away.

“Lillian sends her regards.”

She’d not expected it to be so easy, but then again his answer opens up a completely different can of worms. Lillian’s plan is certainly more elaborate than this, and Lena won’t move too openly until she has a clearer picture.

The way the dealer’s lips twitch as Lena pulls back tell her that he feels like her mother’s name will be enough to stay her hand.

_In which case, he’s about to be severely disappointed._

Lena wears a narrow band of white gold on the index finger of her right hand. It’s not a present, nor a symbol of hers and Kara’s union, but something she designed in anticipation that a time like this may come.

Considering the kind of family she has, one can never be too sure when weapons may be necessary.

All it takes is a certain kind of pressure, and the needle concealed within the ring sinks into the tender meat just under the prisoner’s jaw.

Having felt the puncture he stiffens, but when Lena pulls her hands away there are no tangible signs of what she’s done, except perhaps a slight reddening of his skin where she struck.

She’s just rejoined Alex’s side when the poison takes hold.  Lena watches him gasp for breath, arms flexing as he fights against his restraints. If it wasn’t for the ropes binding his wrists he’d be clawing at his throat, in a desperate attempt to fill his lungs with air.

As the minutes trickle by his face turns purple, but Lena finds no satisfaction in the wheezing noises coming from his rapidly constricting throat. Only reaffirmation of the fact she will do anything to keep Kara safe, even if it means having blood on her hands. Unlike Kara, who is slowly destroying herself over the people she left to die when a foreign hand guided her actions, this is a path Lena is choosing willingly.

The anger simmering deep inside her chest is directed at her mother, and the man dying in front of her is nothing but collateral damage.

He ought to have known that every action has a consequence.

“Lena?” Alex has overcome the initial shock. “Lena what did you do?”

With one last gurgle the man’s lungs give out.

“This is a personal matter now, Alex.” Lena pulls out her phone, names flashing by as she scrolls through her contacts. There are certain people she can call to dispose of the body. Besides, she isn’t ready to see the reproach that’s undoubtedly filling Alex’s eyes. She thinks it’s funny that, despite breaking the rules more times than Lena can count, Alex doesn’t seem to have the stomach for murder in cold blood.

At least that’s what Lena tells herself, because the chance that Alex may be reacting this way out of disappointment hurts more than she would ever have imagined.

“Lena?” Alex places a hand on her arm, squeezing gently, but Lena jerks away. She can’t afford to be weak.

Not now.

“For your own good, you should forget about it.”

She’s aware that her words could be taken as a threat, but she is past caring. She presses the phone to her ear and at the other end of the line someone finally picks up. Lena leaves a series of instructions that are promptly acknowledged.

Leaving Alex and the body behind Lena retraces her steps, letting out a shuddering breath once she’s outside. Brine stings her lungs as she inhales, and when the city’s glowing skyline turns hazy, she has to blink back tears.

She will not cry for the part of her that died tonight because she knows it was a long time coming, and the reckoning is almost a relief. She’s done running from the darkness her name bears.

As for her mother, Lena will make sure to have Lillian beg for mercy before she’s through with her.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those who asked in the comments, there is more to come of this fic - I will add the chapters on this one when ready to post - I just wanted to give you a closure to the first arc while I write the rest. - Dren

**Author's Note:**

> [follow me on TUMBLR for more stories and exclusive content](https://kendrene.tumblr.com/)


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